What the hell is Trapistan anyway?

As his first video makes its web debut, DJ Su Real leads us on a tour of his dark, weird world

Su Real is a tough guy to pin down these days. When he’s not playing mad professor in his West Delhi beat lab, he’s as likely to be tearing up a festival green room or inciting a thousand simultaneous heart attacks from behind the decks. With the release of his first EP, Trapistan, served with enough portentous samples, minor keys and nut-cracking bass drops to send you to bed dreading sleep, Su takes that foreboding into his first video where, well, this is a web premiere, go watch it.

Was this album a cumulative process, or was there a Eureka moment?

There was an eureka moment when I decided on the Trapistan theme, and then there about five months of cumulative effort as I was still learning my way around some new electronic production software and trying out different ideas. I was aiming for a 5-6 track EP, but ended up with about 20 sketches and most of them made it onto the album in the end.

Ok, then when would you say the republic of Trapistan was founded?

Well there is definitely a history of the term that is beyond me. I first encountered the mysterious land in a rhyme by ex-Das Racist emcee Heems, in his Swetshop Boyz track with Riz MC, where he says “Thick black chest hair, fat gold chains, somewhere out in Trapistan selling cocaine”. At first, I was just gonna ask Heems for the a capella and mash it up, but as I mentioned it to a few friends, they seemed quite excited by the “idea” of Trapistan. I’ve always been drawn to theme albums, so I thought “let me develop this some more”. As Heems got wind of this somehow, he pointed me to this.

Does Trapistan exist without Delhi?

Probably not. There’s definitely some kind of neuro-motor effect where the pollution inhaled through my lungs further pollutes my mind. Truth is, the album wouldn’t have existed in any shape or form if I had been in any other city, because it’s only after I returned to New Delhi in 2008 that the music scene and industry has developed to the point where it’s even possible for a voice like mine to be heard. Frankly, it’s absolutely absurd that music like Trapistan and this video is now getting play on TV and radio in India. No one could have imagined it.

Aside from a sense of place, what had to come before, musically, for Trapistan to exist?

Trap music, or Trap-style – is a genre mutation of southern US rap and EDM that’s really taken off internationally in the last couple of years, ever since Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and with big stars like Kanye West and Nicki Minaj jumping on it.

For a lot of listeners in India, this might be an experience without much precedent. How have the reactions been?

The reactions have generally been quite positive, more so than I expected. When I come across aam janta listeners, like last night, when I opened for Nucleya and Alo Wala in front of 2,000 party-starved Jaipur college kids, no one was more surprised than I was at the cheers that erupted when I dropped the title track of Trapistan!

Where do you want to see the electronic/dance scene go next, and what is Trapistan doing about it?

My personal mission for 2015 is to develop a new style of dance music that is purely Indian, as opposed to a cultural import that we mutate. I do want to encourage all Indian producers and musicians and artists to keep searching inwards – we are living in a New India that is radically and rapidly evolving and we need art to put it all in context so we can co-exist.